by Holly Lisle
His upper arms likewise were as smooth as mine, but his forearms were furry.
He felt wonderful.
“How many clothes do you have on?” he asked me. I heard laughter in his voice.
“Bo-allar, cepa, rak-tabi, tabi, rayan, allar, hakan-allar, pantlets, breastbinder, barutis, and soltis.”
He made a clicking sound with his tongue. “We could be here all night.”
“If we were, would that be a bad thing?”
“Not for me,” he said, and brushed a thumb across my cheek. His hands were big, and rough. Calloused, hard. They felt strong like the rest of him. And that strength excited me. “I hope not for you.”
“Not for me, either.”
“Good.” His voice, already deep, sounded deeper. My heart skittered. We felt like we were racing somewhere, and I didn’t know where it was, but I wanted to be there.
His hands then worked at the hakan-allar—my warrior pants—and he said, “By every Eastil god begat by man, how do you get this off? Is there a magic spell upon the thing?”
I put my hand over his hand and slid it to the side. “Buttons on the outside. Hooks and eyes on the inside. It is the way things are done.” And I sighed a little, for truly, it did not need to be the way things were done for me. Not anymore. I was shed of the Order, shed of the Ossalenes, shed of the Citadel. Shed of all save the Eyes, and them and all their darkness I was stuck with.
This was not the time I wanted to think about any of that, however. I helped Aaran get me out of my pants, and then slipped off my allar—my underblouse. And he made a noise in the back of his throat like a petted cat, and said, “By all that is good, you’re a lovely thing. Jostfar help me, the curves on you.”
He tugged my breastbinder off, and buried his face between my breasts, and I held his head while my heart hammered, and while he licked and nibbled his way from nipple to nipple, and then back.
I moaned, and he made that wonderful purring noise again. “You like that?”
“Oh, yes. Truly.”
“What else do you like?” he asked.
I didn’t know. I’d never been in this position before. “Anything. Everything.”
He sat up, still straddling me, his face turned toward me. He was very still.
“Something about that seems not quite … do you know what … anything … ? Anything?” He was faltering, stumbling for words. “Perhaps you don’t …” And he sighed heavily. “This is awkward. But when you have been with other men, what … sorts of things …”
That certainly aroused my curiosity. I’d not thought there would be terribly many options. I wasn’t sure what we were heading for, but my body had liked the idea of going wherever it might have been. And I’d been eager to follow along. Aaran made me feel good. I wanted more of that.
So … what other things were there?
“There haven’t been any other men,” I said.
A pause. A silence. “Well, no, with you locked away in that place with only other women around, I don’t suppose there would have been.” And I could not miss the intrigued note as he asked me, “Well, what sorts of things did the women you have been with do?”
I tucked my hands behind my head. “We were forbidden to touch each other. Or ourselves, save when showering.”
He laughed softly. “But the difference between what is forbidden and what is done—”
“In the Citadel, there was no difference. It was the job of the Seru Obsidian to enforce the rules. They could see everything we did, all the time, no matter where they were. They knew, and they would come for transgressors, drag them out into the dormitory squares, and beat them with whips. Those who attempted to transgress too often were sold as whores, or simply fed to the rats as an example for everyone else. There were … very few examples. We weren’t stupid.”
“Sweet Ethebet. How did anyone survive such a life?”
“Our thoughts were our own. We spent a lot of time thinking.”
He ran a hand over my shoulder, and his touch sent shivers all through me. “No one has ever touched you?”
“Not with intent. Not since my mother.”
“And you would … let me touch you?”
“My heart tells me it will tear itself apart if you do not,” I said. In truth, not even in fighting could I remember it hammering so vehemently against my breastbone. I could barely catch my breath. The blood in my veins felt like it was jumping.
He rested one hand flat upon my belly, and I shivered at his touch. “You will not catch a child from me,” he said, “nor any of the poxes or ills that can come of lying with another. I wear beneath my skin an Amulet of Tagor, sewn there so that I cannot forget it. It will protect you.”
“You want no children?”
“I want,” he said softly. “But I cannot have. Ethebet requires of her warriors that, if they sire children or bear them, they take responsibility for the lives they have brought forth. I seek my sister, and until I have found her, my oath and my responsibility are to her and my dead parents, to Jostfar and Ethebet. I will not abandon my own children, so I cannot have them.”
“It sounds a lonely life,” I told him.
And he whispered, “Sometimes I lose hope. Sometimes, more in these last years, I think that she is gone, that I will never find her, that all my searching is for nothing, and all my sacrifice the same.”
I closed my eyes, and with my hand placed on his hand, I let his desperation carry me above the river of his time. I could not see clearly where it took me; I did not delve too deeply. I wanted only a simple answer, and that I could find, without detail, without pain or danger to myself. “You’ll find her,” I told him. “I see it.”
“I would give anything to know that was true.”
“I am an oracle,” I told him. “You don’t understand what that means. But if I say I have seen a thing and it will happen, it will happen.”
His hand slid over my breasts, down to my belly, lower. He stopped, just as I was certain that he was going to uncover for me the mysteries of the sudden, yearning ache between my legs. “Thank you,” he said. And lay beside me, his hand still.
I wanted the hand to move. To keep moving. To do … well, whatever it had been about to do before he stopped. I sat up and put my face on his chest, tickling my nose and chin with hair. I found his nipples, so tiny compared to my own, and licked one of them. He laughed and squirmed away from me. “Don’t,” he said. “That tickles.”
I licked again, and he squirmed harder. “No. Really. I hate that.”
So I bit him. On the side of the neck, once, a little harder than he’d bitten me. And he growled, and rolled over on top of me.
A shaft, long and hard, unlike anything I had on my body, prodded one of my thighs, and when he pushed my legs wide with his knees, I felt it move against me, pointing to my ache, my hunger, as if it knew. This was the mystery, I thought. This was men and women, and the secrets between them.
He nibbled one of my earlobes, then whispered, “You could be a minx, I suspect.”
I did not know what a minx was, but I wanted to be one, if it meant that he would keep touching me.
He rolled us over upon his bed, so that he was on the bottom and I on the top. And he lifted my hips so that long shaft rested between my legs, slipping and prodding. I shut my mind and let my body lead. I embraced him, and through a steady but bearable pain that accompanied the pleasure, pushed myself onto him and filled myself with him. I moved slowly, and so did he, and the pain became less, the pleasure more.
We began to move together, and all the world receded from that room; all knowing, all caring, all past, and all future. We were the whole universe, the two of us, and for a while all the darkness fled. With my eyes closed, I saw colors; they pulsed with our movements, so that we seemed to dance this new dance within a garden where we were the flowers, endlessly changing. His fingers dug into my hips as he moved faster within me. My back arched and my toes curled and I locked my thighs around him so tightly he had to fight t
o move—and the fighting was as thrilling as the power of locking him tight.
I lost all control. I thrashed against him, mindless and hungry, and he buried himself in me like a swordsman with the final stroke.
All, everything, nothing; I had flesh and no flesh, I was the air and the ocean, I was immortal, and I was a dayfly living and dying and born again.
He pulled me down onto his chest, and held me, and stroked my hair. I shivered, holding him still inside of me for as long as I could, as if I could keep him there forever, until at last he pulled away and my body shuddered a final time. He rolled on his side, with my back held to his chest. It was the perfect moment. I would have stopped all of time to stay right there, right then, in his arms for all eternity.
Had I suspected what would come next, I would have tried.
But the warmth swallowed me, and my eyelids would not stay open, and my mind drifted down into stillness.
Three shadow shapes surrounded me, moving forward and back, first reaching out to prod at me, then pulling away. Three poisoned monsters, two dead, one worse than dead, attenuated and spare, twisted and ugly. None of the three seemed to be aware of the other two; all of the three moved in a vile parody of the dance of flesh that Aaran and I had known.
They were pulling at me. Tearing at me. Trying to force their ways into me.
I sought the meadows in which the woman in white had chased them away. I sought her, hoping that she would save me. But I was alone.
Aaran was gone. The ship was gone. I made my way to my feet, and moved away from them.
If I was to escape them, it would be because of what I did.
As young students, we had been taught by the Ossalenes to shield ourselves against magic. To shield our minds, our thoughts, our souls, and our flesh from evil. I knew the trick so well—it was how I had sent my pleas to Aaran. It was a simple thing. Pull in the strength of earth—but there was no earth.
Then water. Pull in the power of the sea, the restless churning energy. Draw its essence into my flesh, and from the sky pull down the radiance of the sun. Fill myself with both until the power was ready to pour out of me. Send it spinning outward, into a radiant sphere—
The light, the blazing blue-white light, sent all three of them scuttling back.
I woke. Aaran still slept, his arms around me.
I needed to understand what was happening, why the wizards, all three, came after me, how we were bonded, how I could free myself.
I touched Aaran’s arm, and turned, and ran a hand over his face—strong nose, full lips, high forehead. My hand called him lovely, even if the Eyes gave me nothing but guesses. I thought I could be happy forever in his embrace. I wanted to wrap myself around him, and wake him, and take him again.
But awake, the movements of time slid through me and around me, the harsh currents of a bleak, cold river. I could see my own end—not the how of it, not the details. But the underlying cause.
The gate that I had nudged open, I would have to fling wide and tear from the hinges, so that all its horrors could rush in at once.
I would have to use all the power of the Eyes to save the Tonk. And with every step I took into that power, a little more of everything that was me would peel away. I would become a husk of myself, a creature human on the outside, something else entirely within.
And before long, every last bit of me would burn away to ash. To nothingness.
There would be no river that flowed with Aaran’s embraces, with his touches, with his warmth. Not for me. There would be no happy future filled with moments like the one I was clinging to with increasing longing. The best moment I would ever know was the one that had just passed. All the rest would be poisoned by the truth that what little joy I might glean from a moment would be taken back, so that not even memory remained.
I moved carefully away from his embrace, sliding slowly down the bed so as not to wake him. I gathered up my clothing, and put on each piece, but not carefully.
Perhaps we would have another time together. Perhaps a few more. But in the end, I would be nothing but flesh that moved the Eyes, flesh that faltered and fell away into madness. Eventually, I would not even be that.
In that moment, I discovered true darkness. The loss of the light had been nothing, I realized, dressing silently. It had been only a little taste of my future, a forerunner of the realization that the people I loved, and those I was coming to love, would only survive if I embraced my own destruction.
I let myself out of his room carefully, closed his door without a sound, and hurried to the passenger quarters, and to my own narrow bunk. For a while, I hid myself in it, mourning the existence of a future I did not want, and dared not deny.
The little girls were playing tag, running from the passenger commons into the crew commons, and their thundering feet and endless laughing were near to driving me mad. They’d discovered that, no matter what the Seru Obsidian and Onyx might dictate about running, the sailors were willing to excuse anything, and to stand between the children and discipline. Several of the men had taken to spending their off-watch hours making dollies of braided rope and patch-cloth for the smallest of the girls, and were patiently trying to teach all of them a language they called Trade, used, according to Aaran, in western lands, as well as in the harbors of places farther away that traded with westerners. It was also the language the sailors and officers spoke to each other in sailing the ship, though it had nothing in common with Tonk, the language the captain and many of the ship’s officers spoke among themselves.
The previous night lay behind me like a weight—half miracle, half heartbreak. The happy half of me kept reliving my moments with Aaran; the more realistic part of me focused on my duty and my future. Dark thoughts, those.
The mood of the rest of those aboard the ship was bright. A hard wind had come up and we were sailing due south, and apparently quite quickly. The sailors had holds full of treasure, and they were already trying to figure their shares. Most of the seru, other than the Seru Moonstone, had discovered the pleasures of not having anything in particular that they had to do, and had taken to sunning themselves on the officers’ afterdeck—the deck atop the officers’ quarters.
And the children were happiest of all. Men aboard the ship scrubbed and cooked and cleaned and fetched. So the girls, slaves and penitents and acolytes alike, spent their time singing and learning to tie sailors’ knots and climbing in the rigging and struggling to speak Trade.
They had retaken their names, those who remembered them. Slave and Penitent and Acolyte and Sera became Margit and Toshee and Bodeshooka, Iaena and Aanryn and Saatget and Avyn.
I kept Hawkspar because I had nothing else, and could think of nothing sadder than to give myself some pretend name and act like it was mine. And Hawkspar had a power to it that I would, one day, need. While I was Oracle Hawkspar, I was as mighty as any emperor, my word as much honored as the words of many gods.
But I’d had a name once. I dreamed of somehow getting that one back. Unless I did, I would live and die Hawkspar.
I had much to do that day. Sighing and reliving the previous night, either its good parts or its bad ones, would not get my work done. I left the passenger commons and walked into the crew commons. Theirs was a larger space than ours by far, filled with raised-edge tables and benches, a warm stove, men off their watch sitting and talking, children running.
I found the door to the temple, and found Tuua, the keeper, moving about replacing books on shelves.
“Hello,” he said. “You would be … one of the seru?”
“The Oracle,” I told him. “Hawkspar.”
“You’re the one, then, who called us out on this voyage—the one who has so fascinated Aaran.” I heard faint laughter in his voice. “I’m Keeper Tuuanir av Savissha dryn Nakri. But everyone calls me Tuua.”
My name would have once been something like that. Long.
“Tuua,” I repeated. “Your cousin suggested I come to speak with you.”
; “Did he?” Tuua turned toward me, and with a gesture, indicated a bench on one side of a table. He took the bench on the other side, and we both sat.
“I have a … a desperate mission,” I told him. “I am searching for a hidden war, and to find it, I need the last fifty years of Tonk history. I need to be able to narrow down the specific threads of time that will show me the danger—my predecessor found it, but there was no way for her to pass her information on to me. The flow of time into the future does not offer landmarks or tolerate markers.”
“Fifty years? Aiee—which Tonk would you know about?”
“All of them,” I said.
“All of them! Woman, there are twenty-three clans of Tonk alone, though three of them have drifted beyond our ken.”
Aaran had thought the same thing—had said that my clan was one of the Drifted.
I held up the palm of my left hand, and heard Tuua’s breath whistle out. “Eskuu. By Ethebet, Eskuu—breeders and keepers of the lost fedderhorses.”
“Horses again,” I said. “What is it about those horses?” I held up a hand to stop him before he told me, though. The Tonk seemed mad about horses; I remembered them, but I had not been around horses for most of my life, so I did not understand the obsession.
And I had my mission.
“I don’t want to know about the horses, actually. Not now. Just the history.”
“That’s just it. I can’t give you a history. There is no one history. There are thousands—the twenty-three clans, some lost, the tribes that belong to those clans, the taak-dwellers and the herd-riders and the sailors all have their own histories. We share a god, a language, a faith, and a law. But we do not share a history.”
“Do you share an enemy?”
Tuua laughed. “We share the grand ability to make enemies.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “The Tonk of Hyre were plagued for three hundred years by the Eastils. They allied with the Eastils when the Feegash overran them both. When they’d ridded Hyre of Feegash, the Sinalis began raiding the shorelines with their slavers. The Tand Tonks battle the Northmen, and on their east coast, the Valgards. Tonks in Greton were exiled some few years ago by the Gretons; Tonks in Velobrina are constantly fighting the inroads of the Allied Velobrines into their southern territories, and the Waanduun barbarians to the north. And in Franica, pick the Tonk enemies from the Freeboardmen, the Balchose, and the Sanours. I do not think there is a place in the world where the Tonk reside in peace. But that is the way of the world. It is the same for all peoples in all places.”
